20 years of Sven Co-op! -- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 3482406]

[Snapman]

Nothing interesting ever happens on a Tuesday. Except for January 19th, 1999. This is when Sven Co-op beta 0.8 was released to the just recently formed Half-Life community. When it became clear that Half-Life (unlike its predecessors Doom and Quake) would not have a co-operative mode, the community took the task upon itself to fill the void Valve left behind. One of those people was Sven Viking.

At this point, Sven Co-op was not much more than a proof of concept, or to put it into Sven's own words: "mostly just to give everyone an idea of what I'm doing, partly because of various bugs in the map that I don't know how to fix ". At this point the mod consisted of only one map and a few scripts. Sven found help sorting out the initial problems he was facing and the few rooms that made up beta 0.8 quickly grew into a full fledged map, which was released in early May of that same year.

This all happened 20 years ago, in a time when, for many people, going on-line was met with dial-up tones from your modem, playing games on low resolution software rendering and a latency of 300 ms wasn't something to complain about. Luckily for us all, technology has moved forward and so has Sven Co-op. Ever since that first map, SC has tried to push the boundaries of what is possible with Half-Life. We've seen thousands of maps, models and other custom assets made by our community members, millions of downloads and, most importantly, countless hours of co-operative game play fun!

After two decades, Sven Co-op still has a steady and rich player base and a dedicated group of talented developers and we believe, especially since our standalone release on Steam in 2016, that there will be much more to look forward to in the future!

Come celebrate Sven Co-op's anniversary with us by joining the servers and make sure to give "svencoop1" a replay for old times' sake. We'll be there! For the nostalgic or the curious, the original website from 1999 is available here. This is also where you can still find the original beta 0.8!

CONTINUED...